Monthly Archives: December 2017

There was so much wrong with this movie that I’m having trouble recognizing that it was, at least, better than the last one. On reflection I can think of only a handful of scenes I really enjoyed:

1) Rose’s introduction where she meets Fin. Her switch from star-struck to professional was great.

2) Luke’s confrontation with Kylo and overall fakeout. It was the perfect rollercoaster of emotions, from anticipation to shock to confusion to suspicion to elated confirmation.

3) The slicer (or whatever they called him)’s “betrayal”: it was nice to see a mercenary really act like a mercenary and not end up siding with the good guys. I actually look forward to his character in the third movie. I suspect he will end up being good eventually, but would be happy to be surprised.

4) Corny as it was, the caretakers on the island made me laugh, particularly when Rey sliced the rocks and knocked away their cart. Something about their resigned body language was perfectly humorous to me.

5) Yoda’s conversation with Luke was good, and I particularly liked his remark about the ancient texts being rather dry and basic compared to what modern Jedi have learned and could teach.

6) Music overall was great, as usual. Not even the prequels can drag down the score for these films.

7) The lightsaber battle with Kylo and Rey, and their subsequent conversation, was good. Kylo’s goals are subversive and persuasive enough to actually make me think Rey would side with him, which would have cemented the movie as the spiritual successor to Empire’s “bad ending.” Pretty disappointed that didn’t turn out to be the case.

8) The movie at various points seems self-aware of the criticism the first movie got, like Snoke asking Kylo to take off his “ridiculous” helmet. Unfortunately, it did not take this self-awareness into any actually constructive directions…

With that I’ll get to my list of things I disliked, which are far, far greater. I’ll try to summarize to the really important stuff in plot or character missteps:

1) The intro for Rose was subsequently ruined by the two of them finishing each other’s sentences about how the ship was tracked through hyperspace, as if such a unique and shocking thing to everyone else would be immediately apparent to two people at once, neither of which I’ve been given any reason to believe have a thorough understanding of the mechanics or physics involved. I would have been more okay with it if she had figured it out herself, but it still bothers me how quickly this idea was introduced, solved, and never actually explained in any way. Is tracking through hyperspace something everyone will know how to do, now? Won’t that fundamentally change the very nature of warfare in the Star Wars universe? I know the heroes have more pressing matters to address, but like the hyperspace-into-planet-‘s-atmosphere trick in the last movie, I’ve seen this kind of playing fast-and-loose with the rules of the universe inevitably end up coming back to bite writers, and I don’t have any reason to suspect future Star Wars will avoid the plot holes that will arise from things like this.

2) The entire plotline with the ship chase bothered me, not the least because its conflict came from stupidity-through-miscommunication, the lowest level of idiot-ball holding. The lady who took over after Leia made my brain feel like it was melting. I want heroes to make mistakes and suffer consequences, but I have trouble rooting for people who make mistakes as basic as “don’t tell a hotheaded and charismatic underling that I have a plan” and then “don’t tell him the plan even while they’re holding me at gunpoint while staging a coup.” Poe is an idiot, but he’s an idiot within the narrowly acceptable confines of his character archetype and potential arc for growth. The lady with the pink hair was actively immersion breaking to me, in part because she kept getting talked up as some great commander.

3) Let’s talk more about that chase. A whole fleet is chasing 3 ships in a straight line for hours because they somehow can stay just out of range, and not once does the New Order call for reinforcements from elsewhere to jump into the system and cut them off? They were chasing them for hours. Is that all the ships they have in the New Order? Fuck, why not just have a couple of them jump forward, then jump back just ahead of the Resistance ships? This whole plotline was mind-mindbogglingly stupid and the fact that it got through writing, editing, and shooting without someone in charge going “Hey, are our villains just colossally dumb? Like too stupid to be believably threatening?” makes me mark this movie as Prequel levels of mismanaged.

4) Speaking of which, no one anywhere in the Star Wars universe above the age of 10 should be surprised by someone using hyper-speed as a weapon, if that’s a thing that people can actually get away with doing, let alone anyone in a military, let alone someone in charge of one. For Hux to be made aware that they were charging their hyperspace engines, then choose to ignore it until it was too late was utterly immersion breaking. When the villains remain dumb-as-doorknobs throughout the movie, something I was hoping would change after they got their asses handed to them so badly in the last movie, I have trouble taking any threats or heroics seriously. Why is Hux still in charge of ANYTHING at this point? He has made terrible calls during pretty much every single job he’s been given: if there was something specific from him that made their plan to destroy the New Republic planets a success, it was never shown. If Snoke wasn’t dead I would suspect him of being a Jedi plant who’s trying to bring down the First Order from within by keeping some bumbling idiot in charge of its military. The scene of the ship being destroyed was amazing, and showing it in silence was a great choice by the director, but seeing villains be so easily made fools of makes it hard for me to remain interested in a movie.

5) I’m dissatisfied with the dice remaining just long enough for Kylo to find them, as it happened after Luke faded away. Then again, we just saw Yoda return as a spirit yet again and CALL LIGHTNING FROM THE SKY WTF YODA MAYBE YOU COULD HAVE HELPED OUT ON ENDOR WITH SOME OF THAT SHIT so who knows what powers Luke will retain as a spirit and whether he maintained the illusion/construct purposefully to mess with Kylo.

6) Fin’s role in these movies still continues to disappoint and irritate me. Part of it is remaining from the first movie, his character could have been SO MUCH MORE, he could have been an actual storm trooper who had his stomach turned from violence/The Empire after years of slaughter and losing his friend, but no, that was just some random guy who put blood on his helmet, it was Fin’s first mission apparently, he was a JANITOR before then, and so he’s morally in the clear and doesn’t have to have any interesting character arcs other than that of being a coward, which has yet to have any actual impact on the story, especially since Rose stopped him from sacrificing himself with an utterly nonsensical line about “saving what we love” rather than “destroying what we hate” which irritated me even more because they should totally have been captured or killed after crashing a few meters away from an advancing Imperial armada, but whatever, I’ve already harped on the bad guys being laughably incompetent.

7) Goddammit I can’t believe they actually brought Phasma back after throwing her into a trash chute on a planet that exploded less than an hour (?) later, and she STILL accomplished nothing of any importance whatsoever. How she even got out of the trash chute in the last movie, knew to get off planet, and managed to do so in time will forever remain a mystery, unless maybe they bring her back from pointless death yet again. It irritates me all over again that apparently her armor is the only set ever made to actually do something, and they gave it to a coward who capitulated as soon as someone stuck a gun to her head, a gun whose blasts would RICOCHET OFF IF THEY’D SHOT HER ANYWAY APPARENTLY ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME ARRGHIWIFIAOAIWOAWQEI-

*coughs*

Anyway…

8) The casino scene was soulless. Felt like I was watching the prequels again. Not everything in Star Wars has to be grungy, but the aesops were so forced and heavy handed and the setting was just really underutilized. The lack of any actual relevant conversations or emotional moments makes the whole thing feel like empty window dressing. Same goes for the high speed chase and eventual rescue by BB-8 and the slicer.

9) BB-8 incapacitating guards by shooting coins at them, then piloting an AT-ST, makes me once again wonder why droids aren’t allowed to do more in this universe. I’m pretty sure he has a higher kill-count than any of the heroes do at this point, just from on-screen effectiveness anyway. Again, this is like watching Jar-Jar save the day through slapstick. BB-8 is at least doing things intentionally, but if I’m supposed to take him seriously as an action hero, I don’t understand why no one else in the movie is doing so. Hell it was an enemy droid that spotted them! How did BB-8 get away and why was he not immediately deactivated for re-programming? Did they want to torture him too?

There’s more I can say of substance and a lot more I could say that were just minor irritations, but I’m going to limit myself to just one nitpick, since it was truly distracting:

10) Rey’s makeup. She’s on a practically deserted island trying to learn how to be a Jedi but she has time for lipstick and eyeliner? Did she have such obvious makeup in the last movie? I don’t remember it, but there’s nothing in her past as a scrappy desert-scavenger to demonstrate where and why she acquired and learned to use makeup.

I’m probably going to end up ranting about this more at some point and adding to this list. But those are the things most immediately irritating to me right now.

Leaf feels like a stranger as she enters the Vermilion Gym. Going to Pewter or Cerulean to watch Blue’s challenge matches was one thing, but it feels different entering one to participate in anything. She suddenly feels expected to know certain things or behave a certain way.

Red seems similarly uncomfortable at first, but warms up to the classes much faster. It isn’t until the personal fitness training class that she starts to have fun, running with Raff through an obstacle course like it’s just another day at the park, but with more interesting games to play. The newly evolved ivysaur has seemingly boundless energy, and has taken to his nickname without confusion. She had to explain it to Blue: Red understood right away, of course. She looks forward to when the pink bud on his back blooms in full and he comes into his name, but is happy to enjoy this intermediate form for as long as it lasts.

By the time they have their class on coordination and working with others, Leaf can see why Blue recommended she and Red attend. Neither of them get Objections in their first team building exercises, but by the end of it she does want to look into different gym cultures and policies to find out what the effects on the members and badge holders are, how the Leaders come to their philosophies, everything.

“I’m thinking of asking Blue if I can write the article on gyms after all,” she admits to Red between classes.

“Stay strong. Think of the pokemon that still need you to write about their well-being.”

She gives him the side eye. “Are you going to stop eating them if I write about it?”

He grins. “I might, if you write a sufficiently persuasive argument.”

Leaf tamps down her frustration at his flippancy. She knows he’s just trying to motivate her, and appreciates his support despite him not actually agreeing with her, but if she can’t even get her friends to take her ideas seriously, it’s hard to summon the motivation to get others to.

Still, maybe if she can demonstrate objective value from the perspective, like not scaring off abra, it’ll help. “I’ve been meaning to ask, the whole sensing what your pokemon feel… has it changed how you view them at all?”

Red shrugs. “A little? I mean, it makes it easy to remember that they’re living creatures that feel pleasure and pain, but at the same time their experiences aren’t as complex as ours. And my original point still stands: however tragic their deaths are, the ripple effects are still smaller.”

Leaf considers asking him to find some family of pokemon in the wild and see how they feel if one of their family members are taken away… but then considers whether that would change her mind, if it turns out the pokemon barely notice, or are sad for a while then get over it. More realistically, what if it differs by specie? Would that mean it’s okay to eat magikarp but not pidgey? Or pidgey but not miltank?

“A half measure is still better than nothing,” she finally says.

“That’s something I wanted to explore eventually too,” Red says as they approach the next class. “Mostly to see if there’s some correlation between pokemon who are easier to tame or grow attached to their trainer.”

They reach the group of trainers just as their instructor finishes setting up a poster board, his movements slow and lazy. Falling into line with the other students doesn’t feel strange any more either, and she knows that the clothes they provided is part of that, a way to make her feel intrinsic equality with her classmates, despite never stepping foot in a gym class before while others have multiple badges.

Their teacher is a tall, thin man with long curly dark hair and eyes that look baggy from lack of sleep. The impression is reinforced by the bored monotone in which he says, “Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to Tier Threat Assessment. My name is Leo Danton, and I work as the primary coordinator between Vermilion Gym and CoRRNet.”

He vaguely gestures to the billboard to his side, which depicts a map of some generic cityscape and the outlying suburbs, then the countryside around that. “Who here can draw a circle around a Tier 1 threat?”

Hands go up, and an older trainer walks over the marker dangling from the side of the paper to draw a circle around the city.

“Good. Where else could you draw one?”

The trainer pauses a moment, then carefully draws a circle between the suburbs to the west of the city and the edge of the map, where the road presumably leads to another town or city.

“And another?”

This time he draws one around the eastern suburbs.

“That’s enough. What made you choose those locations?”

“They’re somewhat constrained,” the trainer replies. “A Tier 1 threat is supposed to be localized, so… it puts an area at risk, but just that area.”

“And so you had to draw the boundaries somewhere, and conceptual boundaries like ‘city’ and ‘wilderness between towns’ made sense,” Trainer Danton says, somehow making it a question despite the lack of inflection.

“Ah, yeah. Basically.”

Their instructor nods and holds a hand out for the marker back, and the student returns to the group as Danton taps the poster board sheet with it. “Do pokemon know how to read maps?”

There’s silence for a moment, then everyone shakes their heads or says no.

“So what stops a Tier 1 threat from being, say, here,” he circles an area that captures part of the city and its nearby suburbs with his finger. “Or here?” He circles an area at the edge of the city that captures part of the suburb and part of the forests to the south of the city.

The class is silent for a moment, until Red raises his hand. “Habitat might? If the pokemon are rampaging in the forest, they might not leave the forest… or if they’re city dwelling pokemon, like the grimer and muk that overflowed Celadon’s sewers, they would be mostly concentrated in the city.”

Danton scratches the back of his neck, eyes up. “Not a bad answer. But while it’s true that even stampeding tauros will mostly stick to open fields rather than running through a nearby forest or into a city, towns can still be vulnerable, and other pokemon are less restricted. So what’s a Tier 2 threat? Anyone want to draw it?”

Leaf raises a cautious hand, picturing a circle with some arrows drawn away from it, but the instructor calls on someone else, who instead draws a growing outward spiral from the northern wilderness into the areas around it and the suburbs to the south, then even wider until the spiral goes to the edges of the pages and into the city itself. “It threatens all the nearby areas,” the trainer explains. “Either because it’s highly mobile, or because it’s a spreading threat that is likely to kick off other pokemon rampages or panics or migrations.”

“A textbook answer,” Trainer Danton says, and then seems to catch the wary look on the student’s face and says, “But correct.” He holds a hand out for the marker, and waits for the student to return to the class before looking them over. “Boundaries don’t exist in the real world. They’re all made up by us, concepts that only have meaning because we assign them. A lake can appear to be a boundary to a land dwelling pokemon, but some can swim. A mountain can slow them down, but others can dig through it. And then of course there are flying pokemon, who go where they will, or ghost pokemon, who, if their behavior isn’t as random as it appears, at least follow rules too obscure for us to easily predict.”

The class is quiet, and their instructor scratches at his neck a moment. “With that in mind, most people will call Tier 1 threats those that are confined to a certain location, even if the boundaries are fuzzy. Tier 2 threats, on the other hand, will spread from one location to another if left unchecked. Is that clear?” The class nods. “It shouldn’t be, unless you’ve all been working in this longer than I have. You, what’s the maximum flight distance of a pidgeotto without rest?” he asks an older trainer to the right of Leaf.

“Ah. Um.” The trainer’s surprise fades as their brow furrows. “Well, a flock can travel from one end of the region to the other in a day, and… Kanto is, ah, 200 kilometers across? So, at least that.” The trainer appears about to say something further, but then stays silent, gaze down.

The instructor waits a moment for him to continue, then says, “Good.” The trainer looks up with a surprised smile, and the instructor nods. “About the level of answer I expected.”

The trainer’s smile slips, but Danton is already pacing in front of the class, deadpan voice once again speaking with some force despite the monotone. “Estimates like that happen all the time in the field, even among professionals. Not everyone’s a Professor, and even they probably can’t remember all the relevant facts for any pokemon in any situation in the thirty seconds to a minute that trainers usually have to assess an incident and report its threat level. Tier 3 are fairly obvious, they’re events that are not just large and dangerous, but inherently mobile. Something that will spread destruction on a massive scale if not stopped or slowed down in some way.” He draws a line sideways near one edge of the map, then parallels it on the other edge, and begins to shade in the space between them before drawing a line in a particular direction. “Most of you are thinking of the Stormbringers, and that’s not an accident. The system was designed with them at the unambiguous top.” He snorts. “Naively, as it turned out. But that kind of threat is big and flashy and simple to diagnose. Sometimes an incident that looks like a Tier 1 ends up being a Tier 2, while other times a Tier 1 threat is misidentified as a Tier 2. Who can tell me why that’s a problem?”

The class is quiet. Leaf considers how people might bring the wrong pokemon to the situation, but Red raises his hand before she does. “Because the threat assessment helps make sure we don’t overcommit on Tier 1 events, or not commit enough on Tier 2.”

“Another textbook answer. But right. Rangers keep track of these things, to determine if events were accurately called or not. Anyone wanna guess how often they’re mislabeled?” Red’s hand is the only one to go up. After a moment the instructor says, “Anyone besides the Ranger’s kid?” Some people chuckle. “Nothing personal, Verres, but I want a guess, not someone who might have been told or looked it up.”

Red lowers his hand, and Leaf is glad to see he’s smiling slightly. “Why don’t we all guess, then? Write it down first? People are more likely to internalize being wrong if they make a concrete commitment first.”

Their instructor scratches his neck a moment, then shrugs. “Makes sense. Alright everyone, take out your phones or whatever you have on you to write out a pair of numbers. First, some basics. Let’s say there are 100 incidents reported as Tier 1 or 2 in a year in Kanto. How many of that 100 would you each say is Tier 1 or Tier 2?”

The class is quiet for a moment, probably trying to remember, as Leaf is, the last yearly breakdown of pokemon incidents she’d read. Was it something like twice as many Tier 1? That feels right.

“Close.” He turns to the poster board and begins writing. “Last year we had 44 events that were later estimated as Tier 1, and 25 that were Tier 2, so scaling that up to a hypothetical 100 events brings us to about—”

64 to 36, Leaf finishes in her head before the instructor writes it, already considering the next step. Of those 64 Tier 1, how many were reported as Tier 2? And of those 36 Tier 2, how many were reported as Tier 1? It’s a two pronged problem, since the end result would depend on the balance of the errors. If people were really good at estimating Tier 1 but bad at recognizing Tier 2, they might report something like 45 and 55, but if they’re bad at both, they might end up reporting 64 and 36, but all of the Tier 2 are reported as Tier 1. Or the opposite occurs.

Sure enough, Trainer Danton then says, “Okay, so write down how many of each do you believe were reported. You have a minute.”

Leaf thinks over the relevant factors. Red has talked about optimism bias enough, and she’s noticed it enough in her own estimations, that Leaf is inclined to list Tier 2 threats as underreported, and puts 70 and 30. Then she considers that once someone is in a scary situation, they might be more likely to panic, so Tier 2s might be overreported instead, and switches things back to 60 and 40.

Then she considers events she witnessed recently, and wonders who ended up reporting them first. Trainers? Experienced ones, if the Mt. Moon case, but maybe not in Viridian. Or were the Rangers there able to get the word out first? It would take a rather wide set of knowledge to accurately determine the risks involved in so many different scenarios. If newer trainers do some of the reporting, that might skew the numbers in both directions… but the question remains, which is skewed more? If anything, Tier 2 threats probably need more information to accurately diagnose…

She realizes that she should be thinking of these as percentages instead. If considering how accurate people are at estimating Tier 1 events specifically, there is some portion of false positive Tier 1s reported that are actually Tier 2, and false negative Tier 2s reported that are actually Tier 1…

She’s still working a few minutes later the instructor speaks up. “Okay, whatever you guys have now is good enough. Anyone confident in their answer?”

Most stay silent. Red looks like he wants to say something more and more as the seconds tick by, and as soon as Leaf finishes rechecking her math, she raises her hand.

“I think something like 45% of reported Tier 2 events are actually Tier 1s, and 25% of reported Tier 1 are actually Tier 2,” Leaf says after being called on. “Meaning we end up with 51 reported Tier 1 and 49 reported Tier 2, while in actuality there are 64 Tier 1 and only 36 Tier 2.”

There’s another moment of silence as everyone absorbs this, and Leaf feels her cheeks flushing as she realizes she may have taken the question more seriously than she was supposed to.

But the instructor just cocks his head, brow slightly raised. “Pretty close, among the general population. You came about it the right way, but Rangers are more accurate on average, though still likely to overreport Tier 2 relative to Tier 1. That’s how we end up with 33% of reported Tier 2 that are actually Tier 1, and 21% of reported Tier 1 that are actually Tier 2.” He turns looks over the rest of the class. “Anyone find that surprising? Had much more reported as Tier 1?” Most of the class raises their hands. “Who had more Tier 2?” Trainer Danton watches hands fall and rise.

He scratches his neck. “Both Rangers and trainers on average tend to overestimate how much danger they’re facing, but it’s worth keeping in mind different reasons for the error. When a trainer thinks a Tier 1 is a Tier 2, it’s likely because they’re scared. When they don’t realize that the Tier 1 they reported is actually a Tier 2, it’s likely because of simple ignorance of the pokemon or area and how badly things can spiral out of control, how far the damage can spread. Rangers probably have a different motivation, like them being the ones on the front lines, when deciding how many reinforcements to call in. Regardless of which direction you were off by, remember not to make the same mistakes when you’re the one making the call or hearing others do so.” Red’s hand has been inching up, then going back down, for the last minute or so, as different questions are asked. Leaf suppresses a smile as her friend tries to estimate when a natural break in the lesson will occur for him to ask his question. The instructor may be taking pity on him when he finally says, “Yes, Verres?”

“I wanted to ask, is there an official rubric to decide what level of threat an incident is? I’ve never seen one, but if Rangers can make ultimate determinations after the fact…”

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” The instructor sighs. “It’s been discussed before, but none have had enough agreement to be endorsed officially, and the Powers That Be seem to think an inaccurate one would do more harm than letting trainers make their own decisions on the spot, with all the context and data available to them. The determinations the Rangers make are done by committee, and by necessity would likely include information those on the ground who first call them in aren’t always privy to.”

Red is frowning. “But there has to be some basic guidelines, at least?”

“If there wasn’t these classes would be a lot shorter. First let’s test how well you all do without them. Split into groups, and I’ll give you some scenarios.”

Red and Leaf immediately step closer together, and let the inertia of the others forming groups draw them into one of them. Once there are five groups with roughly even numbers, and everyone has introduced themselves, Trainer Danton takes a timer out, looks back and forth between them, then clicks it on.

“An earthquake dislodges the pokemon from Diglett Cave. They burrow under the ground in every direction, coming up at random places to create potholes in Vermilion’s outer suburban roads, shredding electrical lines and dislodging plumbing. They even cause small quakes that erode at housing foundations. Is this a Tier 1 event, or Tier 2?”

Leaf turns to her group. Their member with the most Objections is a young woman named Bretta with curly brown hair and glasses, and she looks thoughtful for a moment, then starts listing things rapidly.

“They’re moving in every direction, so may not be contained. Their quakes may set other pokemon off, causing additional rampages. I’m going with Tier 2. Objections?”

Red raises his hand. “Diglett rarely stray from their territory for long, even if threatened. The key to a Tier 2 should be whether trainer intervention is necessary to prevent a spread, not the size of the initial spread itself.”

“What about the other pokemon being displaced?” another trainer says.

“That’s an if, not a guarantee,” Leaf replies. “I don’t know the pokemon in this area that well, but are there any others that are likely to cause a chain reaction?”

“The forests around the city are full of pokemon that might rampage,” Bretta says again.

“We should default to Tier 1 if we’re not sure,” Red says. “They’re almost twice as common, so unless we have strong evidence that it’s a Tier 2, it’s safer to guess 1.”

“We don’t know if the instructor is following that probability with his examples though,” Leaf points out. “He might give us an equal amount of each, or split them the other way around.”

“Ten seconds left,” another trainer points out, watching her phone.

“Right, executive decision, Tier 2,” the group leader says. “Last chance for Objections.” She eyes the two trainers with a couple tokens.

“I still say Tier 1,” Red says, frowning slightly. “For the rec-”

“Time.” Trainer Danton lowers his stop watch and says, “Group leaders who voted Tier 2, raise your hands.” Three of the five groups do. “Congratulations, you just over committed and left the area’s trainers unprepared for the next nearby disaster. Anyone wanna offer your rationale?” He listens as they offer their reasons, points out how they’re not applicable, then restarts the timer. “Next, a storm surge hits the docks, flooding the closest districts and filling them with tentacool, chinchou, shellder, and others. Figure out a response in 30 seconds.”

This one is a bit easier to label a Tier 1, since eventually the storm would die down and the waters recede, putting no other areas of the city or beyond it in danger. Someone raises the possibility that there’s something non-obvious they’re missing, but time is called before they can discuss it and they end up going with Tier 1, which is correct.

“Next, a particularly long spring leads to local combee hives aggressively expanding. 2 minutes to decide.”

This one seems more obviously a Tier 2 to Leaf, but after a brief discussion, Bretta suggests Tier 1. “It’s not like they’ll go into nearby cities or mountains, if there aren’t enough flowers there.”

“They might try to though,” Leaf objects. “And they could upset the local populations there and cause a chain reaction that might spread further.”

This starts an argument about the likelihood of that, which Leaf only half listens to. Her argument was actually born from a different realization, that the harm caused to the other pokemon would be massive even if no other humans are affected. She knows that’s not the point of the Tier system, though, so she kept it to herself. Still, even if this is determined to be a Tier 1 attack, she’s pretty sure she would label it Tier 2 if she saw it in the wild, and she’s not sure if that should bother her or not. She knows she shouldn’t intentionally use the wrong criterion, but she can’t help but care about what she cares about.

Red raises a hand eventually, causing people to quiet and look at him.

“We have forty seconds,” he says. “Whether it’s a long term problem is less important than whether they need to be stopped before they spread into other areas in the first place. Leaf is right, the risk of a chain reaction is too big. I vote Tier 2.”

“Well it should have been,” Red says. “I think whoever made that initial call got it wrong, they thought it was just a fire from some riled up pikachu. The extent of the rampage was the real threat.”

“And the other pokemon that started panicking too, or took advantage of the chaos,” Leaf adds, thinking of the shiftry that attacked Blue. “Viridian was lucky, because it had two gyms on either side of it. If things weren’t addressed as well, the carnage could easily have continued to spread.”

“Fifteen seconds left,” someone notes. “I’m with them, Tier 2.”

The others around the circle agree, and the group leader frowns. “Anyone got an Objection to gamble on it?”

No one speaks up, and Leaf feels frustrated for the first time at not having one. “I don’t need you to give me one, but if 2 is wrong, I’ll admit it was my idea publicly,” Leaf says.

“Time,” the instructor calls just then. “Who got Tier 2, raise your hands.” Leaf looks at Bretta, who keeps her hand down, looking vindicated until the instructor then says, “Good job. The rest of you just doubled the casualties by not committing enough.”

“Hang on,” Bretta says. “Why is this a Tier 2 but the diglett one wasn’t? They could have riled up other pokemon and spread the rampage further too.”

“Their disturbance would have been confined to the ground, and very few pokemon would be driven to rampage from that,” Danton says. “Observations of diglett movements in the past have shown minimal effect on displacement of other species.” He turns to the group at large, scratching his neck. “Don’t feel bad if you get these wrong. That’s what the class is for.” His tone is still so bland that it doesn’t come off as particularly reassuring, but he puts his timer away and flips to a new page on the board. “The basics to keep in mind in any incident are the following…”

Leaf starts writing as he lists them out:

1. What pokemon are involved?

2. How far can they travel?

3. What pokemon are in their travel zone?

4. How likely are they to fight vs flight?

5. How far can THEY travel?

6. And so on…

Leaf blinks as she finishes writing the last point, ellipses and all. As far as basic guidelines go, this isn’t much, but she understands the underlying idea: every situation will be different, so much so that accurately calling every event would require an encyclopedic knowledge of local pokemon and terrain. She hopes she never has to be the sole person making that call in Kanto, but resolves to spend half an hour every night studying the habitats around them in case she is.

“There are more specific general guidelines that each region’s Ranger Corp puts out. I suggest you all study them, but they’re still no replacement for familiarizing yourself with your surroundings. Yes, Verres?”

“Is the data of past incidents publicly available?” Red says. “I mean, after it’s been analyzed by the Rangers?”

“It is, and it can be a useful read too. A bit dry for most people. But remember that the analysis in them is reached after the facts are known. Unless you happen to be involved in the exact same kind of incident as one described there, it can be misleading to think it’ll prepare you for making those decisions yourself. Speaking of which…”

He turns to Bretta, voice and face as bland as ever when he says, “Those tokens you have, they don’t mean anything. When you leave this gym, people won’t remember how many you had. They’ll remember whether you accepted good ideas or held out for Objections. Just letting you know.”

He turns back to the class at large. “So the next step is to learn the most common types of pokemon attacks in a region, and how terrain can affect their chance of spreading…”

As Trainer Danton starts to list them, Leaf can’t help but notice Bretta out of the corner of her eye, face flushed and hands clenched as her jaw works. She can’t tell whether the older girl is holding in tears or anger, but eventually her hand jerks up and takes an Objection off her jacket before handing it to Leaf, not looking at her.

“I don’t…” Leaf whispers, then shakes her head. “Keep it.”

“Just take it,” Bretta hisses back.

“I’m not going to be here a lot, I don’t need—”

“I’ll take it,” Red whispers from her other side.

Bretta hesitates, and Leaf reaches out and takes the token before handing it to Red without comment. Bretta’s jaw stiffens, but she keeps her gaze on their instructor, and Leaf does the same, distracted as she tries to think of whether she should say something to the girl after class.

As soon as it ends, however, Bretta walks away, and Red is talking at her about statistics.

“What?” she asks after a moment as they walk toward the cafeteria. “Sorry, I was thinking about something else. Start over?”

“I think I finally get Bayesian probabilities,” Red says, voice excited. “Giovanni brings it up every so often—stop making that face, Leaf, regardless of what you think of him the blog is a good information source—and I only ever sort of got it, it was like holding onto water, I’d feel like I understood it one day but the next week I’d try applying it to something and forget the steps or misclassify the variables, but with determining the Tier of an incident it’s really obvious that we should be basing our judgement off of prior probabilities and adjusting them based on the specific instance’s evidence…”

It takes Leaf a moment to catch his train of thought, but as soon as she does her mind starts connecting what he’s saying with what she was doing in her calculations. “You’re talking about what you said earlier, bringing up how often Tier 1 or 2 is in general and weighing that in your decision of whether to judge a specific incident as Tier 1 or 2. So instead of saying ‘I’m 90% confident this is a Tier 2 incident,’ we’d first remember that only 36% of incidents in Kanto are Tier 2 and adjust downward in confidence.”

“Right! That’s why I wanted to know if Rangers have the figures by specific pokemon, because that would provide even more accurate prior probabilities to judge by. If you know that, of all incidents primarily involving beedrill, 8 out of 10 in the past have been Tier 2, then your prior should be 80% that one you encounter is Tier 2, and then you can adjust for whatever other factors you see that may make it a Tier 1 instead, like the swarm is between the coast and a mountain range.”

“Sure, or Tyranitar only having 2 Tier 1 incidents out of 17 over the last 10 years.” She remembers that number surprising her, as the hulking rock monsters tend to be slow and solitary creatures, however powerful. “That makes it fairly easy to default to Tier 2 unless there’s a really good reason to think it’s a Tier 1.”

“But the more important point isn’t about people deciding if an incident is Tier 1 or 2, it’s with the Rangers trying to decide whether to respond as if it’s a Tier 1 or Tier 2 when one gets called in, based on how often there are false Tier 1 or 2 called in!”

“But that’s obvious, isn’t it?”

Red gives her an odd look as they grab a pair of pre-loaded food trays. “Who taught you math?”

“My mom.” Leaf takes the container of cold cuts off hers and swaps it with an extra salad bowl from a different one, figuring some meat lover would be happy to take that one. “Why?”

“I think you don’t understand how much trouble most people have with it,” he says as they find a table. “Because that’s not obvious, I didn’t think to do it until after I realized how useful the prior would be in the first place.”

“But the Rangers are a professional organization, Red, there’s no way they don’t take that into account.”

“I hope you’re right, but I doubt it. As far as I know, Rangers don’t undergo any math classes during their training. Look, let’s say a non-Ranger reports a Tyranitar rampage as a Tier 1.” They sit down, and Red takes out his notebook. He tears a pair of sheets out and hands one to her with a pencil. “You’re the ranger in charge of deciding whether to treat it as a Tier 1, or send a full Tier 2 response. Try writing out your process for figuring out the chance it’s actually a Tier 1, I want to see if I can do it too.”

Leaf does so, eating one handed as she writes with the other. According to what Trainer Danton said…

P(T1): The probability of a Tier 1 Event overall is 64%.

And if 21% of reported Tier 1 events are actually Tier 2, then…

P(T1 | R1): 79% of Tier 1 reports are actual Tier 1 events.

While he already gave her the odds of a false Tier 2 report:

P(T1 | R2): 33% of Tier 2 reports are also actually Tier 1 events.

So, first she wants to find the probability of a Tier 1 Report in the first place. She writes out:

P(T1) = P(T1 | R1) * P(R1) + P(T1 | R2) * (1 – P(R1))

And takes her phone out to use its calculator as she starts plugging in numbers.

.64 = .79 * P(R1) + .33 * (1 – P(R1))

.64 = .79 P(R1) + .33 – .33 P(R1)

.31 = .79 P(R1) – .33 P(R1)

.31 = .46 P(R1)

P(R1) = .31 / .46 = .6739

So 67% of incidents are reported as Tier 1. Combining that with the probability of Tier 1 events, she can find the probability of a report being T1 whether the incident is T1 or T2.

Leaf feels tension in her shoulders and straightens so she’s not hunched over, hearing her mom’s lecturing voice in her head. She pauses to take a bite of an apple and glance at Red, wondering how far along he is. His brow is knitted with concentration, so she forgoes asking him and just goes to answering the final question:

Given that:

The probability of a Tyranitar Tier 1 Event, P(T1), is 2/17

The probability of a Tyranitar Tier 2 Event, P(T2), is 15/17

The probability of a Tier 1 Event being reported as Tier 1, P(R1 | T1), is 83%

The probability of a Tier 2 Event being reported as Tier 1, P(R1 | T2), is 39%

What is the chance a reported Tier 1 is actually a Tier 1, P(T1 | R1)?

Red buries his face in the crook of his arm on the table. “I had it for a minute there, I swear.”

Leaf covers her grin with her hand. “Hang on, let’s see what you did…” She takes his sheet and checks his final calculation just to make sure it’s not something simple, but sees a completely different setup:

2/17 Tyranitar are T1 = ~12%. If we have 100 Events with Tyranitar as main threat that means:

12 are Tier 1

88 are Tier 2

For every 100 Events reported as Tier 1

79 are actually Tier 1

21 are actually Tier 2

For every 100 Events reported as Tier 2

67 are actually Tier 2

33 are actually Tier 1

Group A: 8.52 Tyranitar are Tier 1 and Reported Tier 1

Group B: 3.48 Tyranitar are Tier 1 but Reported as Tier 2

Group C: 66.88 Tyranitar are Tier 2 and Reported as Tier 2

Group D: 21.12 Tyranitar are Tier 2 but reported as Tier 1.

Group A / (Group A+ Group D) = .2874

“Huh.” Leaf blinks. “I see what you were going for, but your probabilities are wrong.”

“What do you mean? Did I miscalculate them?”

“No, I mean you confused what the actual probabilities Trainer Danton gave us were. You just took the probability of a Tier 1 report being a Tier 1 event and treated it as the same thing as a Tier 1 event being reported as Tier 1. They’re not, that just tells you how many True Positive results there are. There are also False Positives and False Negatives for Tier 1 and Tier 2 events that change things.”

Red sighs. “I knew that, I just forgot to apply it. I may have mentioned math isn’t my strong suit.” He rallies after a moment. “But I’m going to get better at it. No more using that as an excuse. Today is already a day of expanding our comfort zones little by little, right?”

“Once you have that, you can find what you really need to do what you were doing, the real rate of a given Tier 1 Event getting Tier 1 Report, or Tier 2, or the reverse.” She starts rewriting the given information, and underlines the key differences in what she found first:

The probability of a Tyranitar Tier 1 Event, P(T1), is 2/17

The probability of a Tyraniter Tier 2 Event, P(T2), is 15/17

The probability of a Tier 1 Event being reported as Tier 1, P(R1 | T1), is 83%

The probability of a Tier 2 Event being reported as Tier 1, P(R1 | T2), is 39%

“See how that’s different than “79% of Tier 1 reports are Tier 1 events?” she asks.

“I think so, yeah. Now I split them up into groups, right?”

“Right, if that helps you more than using the formula. Let’s also expand the number of events and be more precise…”

If there are 1000 Tyranitar events:

118 are Tier 1

882 are Tier 2

83% of the Tier 1 events will be reported as Tier 1, so:

Group A: 97.94 Tyranitar are Tier 1 and Reported Tier 1

Group B: 20.06 Tyranitar are Tier 1 but Reported as Tier 2

39% of Tier 2 events will be reported as Tier 1, so 61% will be:

Group C: 538.02 Tyranitar are Tier 2 and Reported as Tier 2

Group D: 343.98 Tyranitar are Tier 2 but reported as Tier 1.

After checking to make sure Group A and B add up to the 118 Tier 1 Tyranitar Events, and C and D add up to the 882 Tier 2 Events, she then finishes with:

Group A / (Group A+ Group D) = .2216

“Okay. I think I got it.” Red examines the numbers quietly for a moment. “Well, 22% isn’t that much higher than 12%. So it would still make sense to respond to a Tyranitar event as a Tier 2, even if it’s a little more likely to be a Tier 1 after someone reports it as one.”

“How many reports do Rangers usually get before they mount a response?” Leaf asks. “If the next few reports are also Tier 1, that would quickly bring the odds of it being at Tier 1 high enough that they should respond as if they’re accurate.”

Red shrugs. “They start mobilizing as soon as they get the report, but they continue to monitor the situation as that happens and adjust what they send as they coordinate with other Ranger outposts and nearby gyms. But they usually only get a handful of reports before everyone in the area knows about it and stops sending in new ones.”

“Huh. So they may not actually get a chance to update far enough for some really rare instances, if they were to second-guess the really rare events.” Something about that bothers Leaf, there should be a better solution…

“Let me try one with a different pokemon now,” Red says, grabbing a fresh sheet.

“Alright.” She hands him the pencil and watches him follow the steps she did. She’s in the middle of pointing out a difference when someone plops down on the bench to her left.

“Heyoo. This kid owe you money?”

Leaf looks up with a grin. “Aiko! What’s—oh.” She looks around with wide eyes as almost a dozen other trainers sit around them, Blue taking a seat next to Red.

A teenager on Blue’s other side holds a napkin up to catch some of the food before it can spray across to Leaf and Aiko. “Swallow first, you small-town bumpkin. We’re civilized folk here.”

“Hi!” a girl to Leaf’s right says. “I’m Elaine. It’s great to meet you, I’m from Pewter, your article on the museum was awesome, are you writing another one?”

Leaf blinks. “Thanks! And hi, nice to meet you too, um, yeah I’m writing another, but not on Pewter—”

“Oh I figured, what’s it on?”

Blue finally swallows. “Hang on, I asked first.”

“Technically,” the boy to his right mutters.

“Hush, Glen. Spill, newbies. First day, how was it? Great, right?”

“Pretty great, yeah,” Leaf says, gaze lingering on Glen, who Red had said Blue was thinking of inviting with them on their journey. He’s kinda cute… “We were actually just talking about the latest class we took—”

Red’s hand shoves blindly up and covers Blue’s mouth. “Leaf gave it to me,” Red says, gaze still on his equations. “Now hush a minute, I need to get this right.”

“What’s with the math?” Aiko whispers to Leaf.

“Bayes’ Theorem,” Leaf says, still looking around at all the trainers, most of whom are watching them with interest.

“From Giovanni’s blog?” an older boy on Red’s other side asks. “Why are you—”

“Because literal lives may be at stake someday if I misjudge the severity of a Tier 1 or Tier 2 incident,” Red says as he finishes writing, then turns the paper toward Leaf and removes his other hand from Blue’s mouth.

Leaf studies the sheet. “You tried to shortcut the calculation of Group D, didn’t you?”

“Uh. Yeah. How did you know?”

“Your C and D add up to 100 instead of the frequency of Tier 2 events.”

Red curses and takes the sheet back to erase it while Blue shakes his head. “Literal lives at stake, and you shortcut.” Red tries to cover Blue’s mouth again, but he fends him off and turns to Leaf as their arms shove against each other. “Oh, I should introduce everyone… this is Glen, that’s Chron,” the boy to Red’s other side raises his hand. “Elaine introduced herself, and over there is Taro and his sister Chie…”

Most of them are eating and talking among themselves now, stopping as their names are mentioned to look up and smile at her. She tries to keep up with all the new names, ten in total, as her head spins from everyone talking over and under each other. Clearly this is what Red meant by the group Blue and Aiko had started hanging out with, but she didn’t realize it was this big.

“It’s nice to meet all of you,” she manages to say before Elaine starts asking questions about what she’s writing again, which Aiko interrupts by asking if she found a blog for her abra article, letting Leaf answer both at once.

“What about you, what have you been up to?” Leaf asks Aiko before she can get asked another series of questions. “Other than making the gym uniform look good, somehow.”

“Oh hush, you flatterer,” she says while taking Leaf’s untouched carrots and replacing them with her own shredded radish, which Leaf happily starts munching on. “I’ve been great, actually! My sandshrew evolved today, and I can say for sure as of this morning that we’re going ahead with the petting zoo/therapy idea! My dad and I finalized the business details with Mrs. Ino, we should start with a couple trial clients tomorrow!”

“That’s fantastic! And congrats on the sandslash.” Leaf wants to ask how her dad is doing, but isn’t sure how much private information Aiko has already shared with the others.

Red looked up from his paper upon hearing about the ranch, smiling wide. “We’ll be heading out on the cruise soon, but do you think we can go visit?”

Aiko beams at him. “You guys are always welcome.” She turns to the others. “The rest of you too, as long as you tell your friends and family.”

“If I’m going to be a walking billboard,” Glen says, “I demand payment in the form of petting cute pokemon.”

“Oh man, there are so many cute pokemon there,” Leaf says, grinning at him. “You should totally come with us.”

“And the billboard idea’s not bad,” Aiko says, examining him while tapping her chin.

“You’ve done it now,” Elaine says. “She’s got That Look. We’ll all be fitted with wearable boards by the end of the week.”

Blue snorts. “Not me. I can do some sign twirling though, if you want.”

“The wearable one would let you advertise while battling, though,” Leaf points out.

“No advertising during official League matches,” Elaine says. “You’re from Unova, right?”

Leaf blinks. “Yeah. I don’t watch the matches but I know trainers there wear company shirts and hats and bags all the time during recorded matches.”

Leaf’s phone chimes, distracting her from the back and forth, and she lets the conversation flow around her as she takes it out to check if it’s anything important, enjoying the banter. She’s not used to big crowds of people, and would probably find it tiring if she had to deal with it all day, but she has to admit she can see the appeal.

Her slight smile fades as she sees who sent the email, and she quickly opens it, mind jumping between scenarios that would warrant him contacting her again, few of them good…

Hey Leaf. Your prediction came true: Zoey Palmer has been poking around. Reached out to me just today, asking a lot of the same questions you did in your last visit. I was honest, but didn’t mention anything beyond what she asked about, but she seemed suspicious of what Giovanni’s men are doing here. I’ll let you know if she reaches out again, but I’d be surprised if she doesn’t. Hope you’re close to cracking this thing.

Stay safe,

Ryback

“Leaf? Everything okay?”

“Yeah. Sorry, I’ve got to run.” Leaf sees the looks of curiosity and concern, and forces a smile.

“You’re not going to join us for Advanced Formations?” Aiko asks. “It’s one of the funnest classes!”

“Maybe another time. It was nice meeting all of you,” she says to the rest of them, then looks at Red and silently apologizes for leaving him alone. Their joint venture wasn’t as bad as they feared, however, and she thinks he’ll be fine. “Can I rely on you to make sure he learns that?” she asks Chron with a smile.

“Yes ma’am.” He salutes her, and it takes her a moment to realize he took her request seriously. What has Blue been doing to them? Or is it from my own fame?

“Thanks. Call you later,” Leaf says to Aiko, squeezing her shoulder in a quick hug, then heads out of the cafeteria.

She quickly goes to the Gym’s locker room to retrieve her things, then returns to the Trainer House, thoughts already on Ryback’s message and its implications as she bikes through the city. If Palmer is on the right track now, Leaf’s window of opportunity is shrinking. She needs to step up her game, which means finally pinning down her next step in the investigation of Yuuta’s death.

The Trainer House’s work room is quiet but for the clack of keys. It’s a bit crowded considering the time, but the various noises of the others doesn’t bother her. While Leaf has her own computer now, she’s found it easier to concentrate on work related things when she’s in a work related environment, and so her strategy for avoiding getting sucked into arguments online lately has been to put up as many barriers as possible for it. As long as she’s doing research on a public computer, and not logged into her own accounts, she doesn’t have to see all the notifications and messages that are no doubt piling up.

She thought of asking Professor Oak if he’s learned anything a few times over the past week, then realized if there’s something he’d wanted her to know he would have told her already. The next obvious choice was to ask Laura for help, but Leaf still isn’t sure that talking with another reporter wouldn’t violate the “agreement” she made with Giovanni, deceptive though he probably was when she made it.

So she started trying to answer the central question herself, the question Leader Giovanni implied was at the center of the mystery: who benefits from chaos in the dig site?

According to the Viridian Gym Leader, whatever had happened to Yuuta was an intentional act of sabotage for the dig or those connected to it. The strange thing is that the same could be said of Yuuta’s theft, so even if the person or people who killed him were not connected to him at all, there were still two attacks on the dig regardless of whether they were by the same people. She can untangle rivaling motivations later.

So the question she’d been investigating since leaving Cerulean was simple: Who benefits monetarily if the Mt. Moon dig falls apart?

Thankfully her investigation there did most of the legwork in answering that, and as it turned out once she put the data together, quite a lot of people would. The mountain, being a highly valuable pokemon habitat, had a lot of rules and regulations imposed on it that made it hard for most to do business there. This venture only worked because all three cities worked together to facilitate it, but that meant even more red tape, which made the costs go higher.

If it ends up working out, it will prove that projects like this are financially viable while still abiding by the uniquely high standards. Which means, Leaf both surmised and read others assert, those standards would likely be spread to any future digs that open on the mountain… or similar places. Which puts the organizations currently there who have already proven themselves capable in a much better position to take advantage of those later agreements.

Which means in a sense that any organization that tried to outbid the current ones working there, or couldn’t afford to, and even the private security company that competed with the “organizing gym” (the article didn’t specify which, but Ryback confirmed that it was Viridian’s), might all benefit if it falls apart. There are also fossil suppliers that would see their prices undercut if such a major new source of fossils became available to certain groups but not others… but such zero-sum thinking would implicate far too many organizations, and besides, Leaf doesn’t think a rivalry between paleontologists would get so cutthroat as to warrant murder.

Well, most of the time. Maybe. It might if the monetary sums are large enough.

In any case the web of suspects is still too large, so she moved on to the next layer:

Who benefits politically if the Mt. Moon dig falls apart?

Environmental groups who were against the dig. Politicians who want to embarrass their city’s Leaders… something she wouldn’t have considered before her journey, but which seems at least plausible now. Would someone like Mayor Kitto stoop to murder just to make Brock look bad? Probably not, but there’s no way Leaf has the whole picture. The only way she would get to the bottom of this is by assuming that whoever killed Yuuta had motivations that make sense. If that’s not the case then she’ll have wasted a lot of time, but she has to narrow the possibility space somehow.

Once she starts investigating them she can start striking out the ones that are unsupported or too improbable, but until now she’s still been in the mode of generating hypotheses rather than trying to prove or disprove any of them yet.

Her last additions were adding Mayor Kitto to the list, as well as Tonio and Mangal, the mayors of Cerulean and Viridian, and it struck her that if it was someone Misty interacts with they would have to be very stupid or careful to plot against her. Unless of course they’re Dark…

This is where prejudice comes from you know. Still, Leaf checks to see if any of the mayors are Dark, which is surprisingly easy to find out. Apparently any time a politician runs for office there are tons of people wondering what psychics think of them, which leads to a lot of activity on forums where psychics claim this or that mental state that the politician had while they were giving speeches meant whatever the psychic then extrapolated it to mean. Since an actual mental connection needed to be formed to pick up thoughts, however, only those unwilling to give up anonymity would admit to such a breach in privacy laws, which means their assertions of what politicians said were always in doubt.

Leaf loses an hour to that fascinating rabbit hole before she stumbles on the answer to her question as a matter of course: some group fighting for equal rights insisting that Dark people shouldn’t be discriminated against quickly led her to the revelation that apparently Kanto doesn’t have anyone in public office that’s Dark, since, as Leaf’s own suspicions supported, the capability of hiding something made them inherently suspicious in an arena where one could at least usually rely on psychics weeding out the most blatantly dishonest or emotionally unstable.

That just makes Leaf wonder whether someone good enough at concealing their inner mental states, or who didn’t feel any sort of guilt for lying, might not slip through. But that’s a question for another day, and right now she has her answer: Mayor Tonio probably isn’t in on the attack, and neither is Mangal, if Giovanni uses psychics to monitor the people he talks to regularly, which Leaf has no reason to think he doesn’t, stupid sneaky snake that he is…

Anyway. That leaves just Kitto, who she puts on one side of the suspect list. She starts to fill it out with everyone else who has a political reason to want the dig site to fail, and then starts filling out the financial side of the list until she can plot them in a venn diagram.

When she finishes, she has a list of nine names or organizations in the middle, with both political and financial motives. The real culprit may be in the purely financial or political motivation side, or even someone she didn’t even think of with personal or complex motivations, but with what she knows now, these seem best to investigate first.

And as for who she’s investigating, well, every staff member at the dig shouldn’t take too long…

She’s still engrossed in that when her phone chimes with a message from Red. It isn’t until she sees the time that she realizes her stomach is sending unhappy signals to her and has been for a while. Rather than meet up with the others, however, and as tempting as it is, she sends an apology and heads downstairs to grab food from the cafeteria so she can keep working until bed.

She moves through the Trainer House without seeing it, in a state of flow that makes her steps feel light. The temptation to check the forums and emails pops up occasionally, but is quickly carried away by her drive to look into the next staff member, and the next, and the next, into the late hours of the night.

Days pass, and Leaf barely leaves the Trainer House other than to give her pokemon some exercise. She returns to the Gym a couple times for classes that Aiko, Blue, or Red insist she joins them for, and it’s always hard to leave once she’s there, but before long the investigation calls her back. It’ll be worth it, she tells herself as she turns down another dinner invitation with a pang. Getting to the bottom of this will be worth it…

It goes slowly but steadily, and little by little she puts together a shortlist of dig employees that have worked for or with some of the primary suspects, including big names like the Cinnabar Archeology Institute, the Silph Company, and Rand Tanaka, an excavation magnate who recently got into politics and became the mayor of Celadon City: apparently he’d tried to get his city in on the action at Mt. Moon, but was unable to.

Normally this many potential leads would excite Leaf, and there is some of that, but as the days pass that excitement is tempered by a growing suspicion. Throughout her investigation, what she’s found are not just people who have reason to sabotage the dig, but also some who have reason to strike at Giovanni as well. Throwing his political weight behind a decision that limits Silph expansion in Viridian, speaking out against Tanaka’s campaign… What was it he said, while trying to convince her not to publish? I’ve learned to recognize the actions of an enemy, and I’ve made plenty of enemies. Something like that.

Not all the companies and people on the list have obvious enmity with Giovanni, but he’s been a powerful figure in Kanto for so long that it seems he’s interacted enough with almost all of them at some point that searching for his name and theirs brings something up.

At the time Leaf just believed that Giovanni was saying what he could to convince her not to publish. Calculated, sure, but only for that obvious goal. Since her investigation is guided almost entirely by the information he revealed to her, however, she’s started to consider again what his goal in that conversation was. If he wanted to throw her off track, he could have lied to her. Maybe he did, though if so there’s enough truth laced into what he said that she can’t easily ignore it.

Instead, it seems more and more like what he said was exactly what she would need to hear that, not only would she not publish the story, but if she continued researching it anyway, she would know where to look…

Until Leaf had to finally wonder if the Gym Leader intentionally told her everything he did, not just to keep her quiet about what little she knew, but also to increase her chances of finding more. After all, he professed to be searching for the culprit himself. Would he not also benefit if she found them?

The strangest feeling began to grip her as she worked day to day, like she was being watched. Leaf resisted the urge to look around often, calling herself silly. But she couldn’t ignore the source of the feeling: the eerie idea that she’s just a puppet whose strings are being pulled.

Does it matter? Won’t you want to find out even if Giovanni set you up to? In a sense he might be doing you a favor at the same time, making use of you in a way. He did talk with you as if forming a business agreement: in fact he even offered to repay you for services rendered!

Leaf scowls at that particular inner voice, distrusting its appeal. One thing’s for certain: her excuse to not tell Laura about what she’s getting into doesn’t feel justified anymore. Even without going into specifics, she needs the advice: she feels like a tympole swimming in the shadow of something large and hungry, and while she’s not scared, exactly, she wants to know for sure if she’s imagining it or onto something.

After finishing the list, she closes down her work at the public computer room and moves to a more private work room where she takes her laptop out and, after weeks of wanting to, calls Red’s mom to tell her everything. It feels good to have an excuse anyway, since aside from what she’s been working on, she hasn’t had the chance to talk to her much since they arrived in Vermilion, and she’s curious to know what Mrs. Verres has been up to.

“Hi there, Leaf!”

“Hey Laura! How’s it going?”

“Wonderful, dear! Everything’s great. Just great. What have you kids been up to?””

Well, Laura certainly seems more cheerful than usual. Maybe it’s from not having spoken in a while, but it makes Leaf loath to bring up something more serious, so she happily launches into a summary of her past couple weeks, including her visits to the gym and how surprisingly enjoyable she found it. This leads into Laura explaining that she recently started going to the Celadon Gym to learn how to train her new tangela, which led to them comparing notes about the differences between the gym cultures. Leaf is a bit surprised to hear that Laura is suddenly interested in training pokemon, but she supposes that the grimer attack may have made her feel unsafe living without any.

Eventually the conversation topics start to wind down, and Leaf runs out of excuses not to bring up her main reason for calling. “By the way, I have something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about.”

Laura chuckles. “I figured as much, with how busy you all must be from the abra sale. What’s up?”

“It’s actually not related to that. There’s something I never told you…”

Leaf haltingly explains her investigation at Mt. Moon, the visit with Giovanni, her agreement with him, the research she’s done since then, and what made her finally decide to break it, listing the names of her primary suspects and the workers at the dig that they’re connected to.

“I just feel like I’m suddenly really vulnerable, like it’s not my investigation at all any more. I don’t know if I’m being paranoid or not, but I just had to check and see what you think. Even if he prodded me into continuing the investigation, should I?” Leaf waits a moment, hand nervously moving her computer mouse to open and delete various emails, barely seeing them. “Mrs. Verres? You there?”

“Is—” Leaf stops as the call disconnects, then stares at her phone. She knows Laura’s anger probably wasn’t directed at her… maybe Giovanni, for tricking Leaf? Unless she’s being honest and something came up, maybe she got an email or something just hit the news…

Leaf opens some Celadon city news sites and scrolls for anything that might have happened within the past few minutes, then the past hour, then anything from earlier in the day.

There’s nothing. Maybe it was something even earlier that Laura’s been looking into that she got an update on. Leaf keeps scrolling, barely paying attention at this point as she passes by stories on politicians speaking for or against new housing policies, progress on repairing the city’s sewage system, some weirdo in a mask who escaped police by jumping between rooftops, a notice about construction being done to Cycling Road…

Woops. Leaf quickly types, Nothing, sorry! I just called her and she acted really cheerful, then suddenly became super serious and said she’d call me back. That was half an hour ago.

Don’t scare me like that. Maybe something came up for work.

Yeah. Sorry for bothering you.

Leaf puts her phone down and stares at the wall, mind wandering, but her phone chimes again after a moment.

What was she cheerful about?

I didn’t ask. I guess she was just having a good day. That’s why the shift took me by surprise.

Why did you say she “acted” cheerful then?

Leaf is taken aback a moment, and checks to see that yeah, she did write that. I didn’t mean anything by it. Just the word choice that came out while typing.

You sure? She might have been in the middle of something, and pretended everything was fine so you wouldn’t feel like you were imposing.

It would be quite a coincidence if she just happened to get interrupted when Leaf brought something so important up. It’s possible I guess.

“It’s possible” is a polite way to say you don’t think so 😛 I can check in with her if you’re worried.

No no, that’s okay! I just wanted to make sure I didn’t interrupt something important that you might know about.

Ah. We haven’t really talked much since I got to the city. Quick call after the arrival interview, and that was about it. Sorry.

Leaf remembers her conversation with Red after the surprise visit on the road from Cerulean, and reminds herself to check in with him later about whether he and his mom are doing okay. The thought makes her think of her own mom, and she decides to write to her while she waits for Laura to call back.

No prob. Thanks anyway! How’re you doing with Bayes?

I think I’m close to mastering his secrets.

Really?!

I think I’m close to comprehending one of his secrets. Possibly. Gotta get to a training session though, let’s go over it later?

Sure! TTYL!

She puts the phone away and starts emails to her mom and grandpa. She writes to her grandpa fairly often, so his goes by quickly as she mentions funny things that happened recently or new tricks she taught her pokemon, but she never had that kind of relationship with her mom, so writing to her is slower. Eventually Red’s idea for her to return home briefly and register a teleportation spot there comes to mind, and she gratefully decides to end the email by bringing that up as a possibility she’s considering.

After both emails are written and sent and she still hasn’t heard from Laura, Leaf decides to just switch to one of her other projects. She still needs to finish the piece on what she did while catching abra, so she gets to work on that.

It’s engrossing enough putting herself back in the moment that she actually forgets she’s waiting for Laura’s call by the time the phone rings, Leaf sees with a shock that it’s already past seven. Then a wave of disappointment hits her when she sees an unknown number. She leans back in her chair as she answers it, despondent.

“Hello?”

“It’s me, Leaf.”

“Laura!” Leaf bolts upright. “Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine. Sorry I took so long.”

Leaf frowns. Despite her words, Laura’s voice is as serious as Leaf has ever heard her. “What happened?” What happened to your phone?

“Listen… Leaf, do you trust me?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then please, please don’t react the way I’m afraid you will to what I’m about to say. Please, trust that I have good reasons for it.”

Leaf’s heart pounds in her chest as she tries to imagine what’s coming and fails. “Okay. I’ll try.”

“You need to stop researching the murder of the Renegade.”

Leaf stares at the wall, face blank.

After a moment of thought, she continues to stare at the wall.

In that moment, a dozen ideas surface and then peter out, replaced by new ones.

I found something important

Dangerous

No she knew

Did she find it first?

Did I miss it?

Did she find it out today, after hanging up?

What was it?

Leaf’s blood runs cold as a new line of thought intertwines and brings up new possibilities.

Leaf closes her eyes and rests her forehead on one hand. Somehow, some way, she has to find the time in her schedule to train against psychic intrusion. It won’t help if she doesn’t know it’s coming, but it’s better than nothing. Right now what she can’t stop thinking of is all the opportunities she gave up at the gym, to spend time with the others, to work on this story… just to be told, again, to walk away from it. “Laura… the past few days… I just spent most of my week on this, and more time before that, I… can’t just give up on this, Laura, not without knowing why. I can’t.”

“I understand, honey. Believe me, I do. I just can’t tell you yet. I need you to promise to stop looking into it for… I was going to say two months, but realistically it may take longer.”

Anger starts to make Leaf’s head pound, anger at being given such an unarguable ultimatum after being asked if she trusted her. “You’re treating me like a child again. Don’t say you’re not, I know you are, it’s something dangerous and you said you wouldn’t-”

“Leaf. Please, listen to me.” With an internal wrench, Leaf realizes that Laura sounds on the verge of tears. That’s not fair, that’s what mom used to do, you can’t use that against me too… “Don’t tell Red this, I’m only telling you because I understand how you feel, because you deserve to know… I’ll tell him on my own, I promise, I was just waiting until I could… could give reassurances…”

“Reassurances about what? What happened?”

“Remember what I told you? About getting involved in political things?”

“I do. I also remember what you said after: that I was already risking my life every day.”

“I was stupid to say that. No, more naive than anything. I’ve had my eyes opened rather rudely to just how much, recently. The tangela I got, that I started training with…”

Leaf frowns at the topic shift, still impatient to hear what had happened, then puts it together, eyes widening. “Oh, Swords of Justice,” she whispers. “Someone attacked you? Who? When?”

There’s silence on the other end, enough of it that Leaf’s imagination supplies some truly frightening scenarios of Laura being mugged, or worse… Her skin runs cold as she physically flashes back to the seconds of terror and minutes of numb shock that came from her encounter with Yuuta, but then Laura says “Not exactly,” almost begrudgingly, and Leaf has a moment of sweet, sweeping relief, followed by gratitude that Mrs. Verres didn’t lie, as tempting as it must have been. “But I got the tangela because I was informed, under no uncertain terms, that I needed to be prepared to defend myself. And I thought I listened, but I was wrong. I got hit in a direction I wasn’t really expecting, and I should have been. Do you understand? I’ve been in this industry for years, but I still had to take a hit, had to get hurt, for that training and experience to kick in. You have neither of those things. Yes, you’re going out there and risking your life in your journey, but you’ve trained for that. You haven’t prepared for this, not really. Please tell me you understand that, it’s not about your age, Leaf, it’s about what you’re prepared for. Small flare ups like Pewter were a good way to get experience, but not this, you walking into it thinking you’re ready would be like me deciding to go to… to Victory Road, for me to go through the caves at the Plateau after having my one pokemon for all of a week!”

Leaf’s eyes are closed, forehead against one palm. “Give me a minute, please. I need to think about this.”

“Of course, hon. Take your time.” Laura sounds nervous and distraught, but Leaf can’t think about that right now, she can’t let her mom’s… she can’t let Laura’s emotional state influence her decisions…

“I’ll call you back, I just need some time… is this number…?”

“No, not mine. It’s a friend’s I know is secure. I’ll be here for a little while though.”

Leaf wants to know more about the friend with the secure line and the need for it at all, but she just says “Okay,” and hangs up. Then she packs her things up, goes to her dorm room, and lies on the bed, eyes closed to examine her motivation as best she can.

It doesn’t take long to realize that her thoughts are circling without use. She needs to talk to someone about this, but realizes she can’t. Her mom and grandpa and Professor Oak would agree with Laura, and she promised not to tell Red, and Aiko… after what she told Aiko, how could she possibly say that she’s considering letting this go because it’s too dangerous?

“It’s not about your age, Leaf, it’s about what you’re prepared for!”

And a part of her understands that, understands it very well, because isn’t that why she called Laura in the first place? Why have a mentor if she won’t listen to her at the time when she really, truly needs guidance, and her mentor is so clearly adamant?

Because it would hurt, to give this up. Again. To let this go, again, to let Zoey win… I found something, who was it, which of the people at the dig killed him… I have to know…

Leaf’s eyes burn, but she takes deep breaths until it fades. I’m stuck in a role, she realizes. This is what Laura was afraid of. I’m in the role of the hotheaded child who thinks she knows better.

Knows better than Mrs. Verres? Who’s spent years in the field, been through so much more? What are the odds, of that? What’s the prior, that a 12 year old who just started in a vocation would have better instincts, better insights? What are the sheerly lopsided odds against it?

There’s no one else in the dorm at the moment, but Leaf keeps her voice low anyway. “But you have to promise me that you’ll tell me what you discovered. You said two months, and I won’t hold you to that exactly, but I can’t promise I won’t get impatient eventually.”

“I understand. I can also promise that when all of this comes to light, you’re going to get the whole story, and credit for helping expose it. And it wasn’t something small, Leaf, I had a lot of information with little to connect it, but what you told me… you have to keep building your name, in the meantime, get some protection through recognition, build contacts, get more experienced. That way when the fallout comes, you’re ready to handle it.”

Leaf grunts something that may conceivably be taken as a goodbye and then flops onto her bed face down with a sigh. She stays there for a few minutes and tries to convince herself she’s done the right thing.

Only a few minutes, however: she has to get to work, after all, so she’s ready for whatever’s coming.